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Nominate a great middle or high school STEM teacher for a $2,000 award, introduce a girl to engineering, or coach a Future City team. National Engineers Week is Feb. 22 – 28, 2015 and there are plenty of local events and hands-on activities to raise awareness of what engineers do and how their work makes the world a healthier, safer place.

Apply by February 12, 2015 to attend the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program, a free, seven-week course of intensive instruction for high school sophomores and juniors in robotics, Web design, and mobile app development. The program also includes mentoring, demos, field trips, and workshops led by the computer industry’s top female entrepreneurs and engineers.

The DuPont Challenge is one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious essay competitions for students 13 and older in grades 6-12. It focuses on scientific and technological developments that create solutions to such pressing global challenges as food, energy, and protecting the environment.
New deadline is February 9, 2015.

The National Youth Science Camp (NYSC), one of the country’s premier science education programs, offers graduating high school seniors a month of outdoor adventure and hands-on projects in the beautiful woods near Bartow, W.V., all travel costs and camp fees paid.

Light-emitting diodes illuminate everything from traffic signals to shimmering sculptures like this one by Makoto Tojiki. But the researchers whose early 1990s breakthrough – a blue-light LED – made today’s energy-saving white lamps possible toiled mostly in the shadows… until they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2014.

No longer. In September, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in physics to Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University, and Shuji Nakamura, a professor of materials and co-director of the Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Celebrate Computer Science Education Week from December 8 to 14, 2014, with a host of classroom activities and events designed to inspire the next generation of inventors and programmers. Want to get more girls interested? Code.org kicks off the week with a tutorial featuring Anna and Elsa from the Disney hit Frozen.

Kick off the week by organizing an Hour of Code. Join 1.5 million people from around the world in creating fun, hands-on sessions that ignite interest and open opportunities in the wonderful world of computing.

Had the WNBA existed during her childhood, Aprille Ericsson jokes that she might have gravitated to pro basketball as a profession. Instead, the Brooklyn, N.Y., native became an aerospace engineer and NASA’s first African American Ph.D. rocket scientist.

The world’s most visited man-made monument turned 125 this year. Built for the Paris World’s Fair of 1889, French engineer Gustave Eiffel’s famous tower attracted scorn before it opened. But its role as a research lab for weather, aviation, and telecommunications helped ensure its longevity.

Structural engineer Emma Cardini has inspected some pretty impressive facades, including the Chicago Tribune Tower’s ornate spires and the Bridge of the Americas in Panama. Still, nothing compares with the capital bird’s eye view she literally enjoys on her latest job: rappelling down the marble sides of the Washington Monument to assess the damage from late August’s 5.8-magnitude earthquake.